Grounded
What's playing at the Roxie? A picture about a Minnesota man falls in love with a Mississippi girl, that he sacrifices everything and moves all the way to Biloxi...or a film called "Indestructible." The latter is made by and about a guy who came down with ALS, and a reliable source tells me it's superb, and the website looks absolutely intriguing, and I'm not getting any younger...and everything about going to the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco makes sense, being only a couple blocks from the BART (subway) station and...I'm not going to do it.
The fact is, I'm not sleeping enough, staying up late fussing over travel details. In a sense, this isn't such a bad thing. I am, if nothing else, acknowledging the limitations of my aging body. In particular, I've been concerned about the long flight home. I can recall a time, quite awhile ago, maybe 12 years in the past, when I used frequent flyer miles to go to London via Dallas. Even then, in an entirely different musculoskeletal era, there was simply too much sitting. Worse, on the flight from Dallas, I got stuck in the middle of a five-seat-across row, and I'm still working the kinks out of my butt. So, worrying and fretting and what-to-doing about the merciless trip from London-Gatwick to, inexplicably, Indianapolis, and then on to San Francisco. Upgrade? Staggeringly costly. Change flights? It's really too late. Make a call to the airline, well why not? And I got seated in the bulkhead row, which is all that anyone could want. Problem solved. There is a God.
If you don't doubt the latter, check out my garden. I was just about to fire up the electric toothbrush, make ready with the coyote urine, and throw another load of Dr. Earth, along with some chicken manure, into my raised beds, when I saw them. Dangling, swelling, rounding. Tomatoes. Real ones, on the way, without any further intervention from me, and not requiring additional worry. Why not? It's spring. Things are springing. And by the time we spring back from Europe, even if I'm no spring chicken, I'll be ready to spring into agricultural action and bring these puppies home, talking them down, lining them up with the approach, hang on guys, because your Pomodoro destiny is about to be realized.
As for "Indestructible," I hope it will finally turn up in Netflix, and I'll see it on the big plasma screen. The experience would have been better at the Roxie. Some films, perhaps most films, need an audience, the shared breathing, laughter, coughing and simultaneous experiencing that goes with getting out of the house and into someone else's chair. But for me, the experience would have been dominated by transit. And the schedule is just a little too tight. Rushing out the door of the Roxie, down to the BART station and hoping for the 7:14 connection at Millbrae. Marlou and I have work to do. We need to go over travel details tonight, and I want to be here.
Still I will miss something. I will miss the experience of rolling around San Francisco streets alone. For me, there's something inherently stimulating and lonely in these imagined scenes, crossing Mission Street, rolling up the sidewalks of 16th beneath the canopy of Muni electric bus cables, dealing with the Roxie's interior...the last time I went there, I wasn't using a power wheelchair. Doing it all alone, feeling everything I have done alone and feeling, always feeling, the sadness inherent in this. Perhaps, anticipating that I may be alone again. Much of me doesn't really believe this, but I understand that it's part of the work of my life to try on the knowledge, slip into it and get a sense of how it feels. Marlou is doing remarkably well, thank you very much, and we mean to keep it that way. Still, it's not entirely up to us.
So, however rewarding, it would have been a sobering and pensive journey to the Roxie. It would have been a chance to settle down from this frantic pace of trip preparation, and hand matters over to the rail companies and give up for a few hours. It would have been time for me. Time to face my life, on its own, amid the anonymity of trains and cities. Such melancholy times are not to be avoided. They are saddening, but they are grounding. The thing is, what's even more grounding is the ground. That's where the tomatoes come from. That's where I'll be this afternoon.
The fact is, I'm not sleeping enough, staying up late fussing over travel details. In a sense, this isn't such a bad thing. I am, if nothing else, acknowledging the limitations of my aging body. In particular, I've been concerned about the long flight home. I can recall a time, quite awhile ago, maybe 12 years in the past, when I used frequent flyer miles to go to London via Dallas. Even then, in an entirely different musculoskeletal era, there was simply too much sitting. Worse, on the flight from Dallas, I got stuck in the middle of a five-seat-across row, and I'm still working the kinks out of my butt. So, worrying and fretting and what-to-doing about the merciless trip from London-Gatwick to, inexplicably, Indianapolis, and then on to San Francisco. Upgrade? Staggeringly costly. Change flights? It's really too late. Make a call to the airline, well why not? And I got seated in the bulkhead row, which is all that anyone could want. Problem solved. There is a God.
If you don't doubt the latter, check out my garden. I was just about to fire up the electric toothbrush, make ready with the coyote urine, and throw another load of Dr. Earth, along with some chicken manure, into my raised beds, when I saw them. Dangling, swelling, rounding. Tomatoes. Real ones, on the way, without any further intervention from me, and not requiring additional worry. Why not? It's spring. Things are springing. And by the time we spring back from Europe, even if I'm no spring chicken, I'll be ready to spring into agricultural action and bring these puppies home, talking them down, lining them up with the approach, hang on guys, because your Pomodoro destiny is about to be realized.
As for "Indestructible," I hope it will finally turn up in Netflix, and I'll see it on the big plasma screen. The experience would have been better at the Roxie. Some films, perhaps most films, need an audience, the shared breathing, laughter, coughing and simultaneous experiencing that goes with getting out of the house and into someone else's chair. But for me, the experience would have been dominated by transit. And the schedule is just a little too tight. Rushing out the door of the Roxie, down to the BART station and hoping for the 7:14 connection at Millbrae. Marlou and I have work to do. We need to go over travel details tonight, and I want to be here.
Still I will miss something. I will miss the experience of rolling around San Francisco streets alone. For me, there's something inherently stimulating and lonely in these imagined scenes, crossing Mission Street, rolling up the sidewalks of 16th beneath the canopy of Muni electric bus cables, dealing with the Roxie's interior...the last time I went there, I wasn't using a power wheelchair. Doing it all alone, feeling everything I have done alone and feeling, always feeling, the sadness inherent in this. Perhaps, anticipating that I may be alone again. Much of me doesn't really believe this, but I understand that it's part of the work of my life to try on the knowledge, slip into it and get a sense of how it feels. Marlou is doing remarkably well, thank you very much, and we mean to keep it that way. Still, it's not entirely up to us.
So, however rewarding, it would have been a sobering and pensive journey to the Roxie. It would have been a chance to settle down from this frantic pace of trip preparation, and hand matters over to the rail companies and give up for a few hours. It would have been time for me. Time to face my life, on its own, amid the anonymity of trains and cities. Such melancholy times are not to be avoided. They are saddening, but they are grounding. The thing is, what's even more grounding is the ground. That's where the tomatoes come from. That's where I'll be this afternoon.
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